Early Life
Jim Jones was born in a rural area of Randolph County, Indiana, near its border with Ohio, to James Thurman Jones (May 31, 1887 – May 29, 1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 11, 1977), who believed she had given birth to a messiah. He was of Irish and Welsh descent. Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to nearby Lynn, Indiana, in 1934 where, he grew up in a shack without plumbing. Jim Jones and a childhood friend both claimed that Jones' father was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.
In interviews for the 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death". They alleged that as a child, Jones frequently held funerals for small animals and had reportedly stabbed a cat to death.
Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully, noting each of their strengths and weaknesses. After Jones' parents separated, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. He graduated from Richmond High School early and with honors in December 1948.
Jones married nurse Marceline Baldwin in 1949, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana. He attended Indiana University at Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African Americans impressed him. Jones' sympathetic statements about communism offended Marceline's grandmother. In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.
Read more about this topic: Jim Jones
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I do not know that I meet, in any of my Walks, Objects which move both my Spleen and Laughter so effectually, as those Young Fellows ... who rise early for no other Purpose but to publish their Laziness.”
—Richard Steele (16721729)
“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
—Oscar Wilde (18541900)